Friday, April 29, 2016

Nosh 13: 'Miles Ahead' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, served fresh each Friday.

­

APPETIZER (review of ‘Miles Ahead’)

Once you’ve seen Steve Allen walk
like a smiling stick (or clarinet) through The
BennyGoodman Story, or Forrest
Whitaker stuck in glum pieties of pain as Charlie Parker in Bird – or even Dexter Gordon playing a
sweet, aged version of himself in the reverent but moving Round Midnight – it is a high-relief pleasure to find such a risky, emotively
bopping performance as Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis in Miles Ahead. Here is a raw, proud, angry, paranoid, jazzed man, less an icon than an artist
who fears that his muse has fled.

Directing himself, Cheadle plays
the great trumpeter in his silent, “lost” years from 1975 to 1980. The
close-ups and outbursts that Cheadle gave himself are not vain. They offer
insights as riffs of exposure, with feelings improvised like a terrific solo.
The master of bluesy make-out ballads and then funk-rooted fusion
sounds, now isolated, avoids his instrument and most friends. Davis’s 1989 memoir stated the
reasons: “I felt musically drained, tired. I was beginning to see pity in
people’s eyes when they talked to me … It was a long, painful road back to
sanity and light.”

At times, trapped in his private
refuge, Davis is like Philip Baker Hall’s lonely, spouting Nixon in Secret Honor, turning on a spit of rancid
grievances. But Miles (unlike Dick) remains sexy in decay, and his profanity
(in a raspy gravel voice that's almost another kind of horn) strikes erotic sparks. In
his most emphatic, demonstrative performance since radio-TV spieler Petey
Greene in Talk to Me (2007), Cheadle
get ace help from cinematographer Roberto Schaefer and editors John Axelrad and
Kayla Emter.

The scenes often have a lacerating
flow and urgency, though the script (by Cheadle and Steven Baigelman) is bumpy.
An opportunistic reporter (funny Ewan McGregor) breaks into Davis’s sacred
space, and that leads to a violent pursuit involving a hidden session tape that
Miles guards like future treasure. Past triumphs don’t interest him, and he
isn’t at all sure there will be more. The tape, a sort of Hitchcock McGuffin
device, dangles the issue. It provokes predatory music producers, cocaine jags
and a chase that feels like a sop to the gangsta-rap audience.

Like most “biopix” films, Miles Ahead has predictable hooks:
racism, addiction, star power, a lost love (impressive Emayatzy Corinealdi), an
upstart trumpet challenger, jolting flashbacks to highs and lows. This is not a great movie, but it's a great portrait. The full thrust of dramatic tension, supported by the sensual flux of Miles’s music, is in Cheadle’s un-preening and stunningly frank performance. Perhaps no
actor playing a musical god has used fewer notes to more piercing effect.
That’s very Miles.

Miles Davis salutes Citizen Orson,
and a Welles friend: “Now, it ain’t that I don’t love Frank Sinatra, but I’d
rather listen to him than maybe get in his way by playing something that I want to play. I learned how to phrase
from listening to Frank, and also to Orson Welles.” (From Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey “wanted full incarnation,
warts and all, choosing to ‘stick with that anarchic humor, stick with him
being a selfish bastard (and) a businessman out for himself.’ He also
dis-incarnated, losing 47 pounds (183 to 136) on a diet of veg-and-fish cups.
Most surprising, he told interviewer Tim McMasters, was gaining ‘an amazing
amount of energy from the head up’ as his body skeletized.” (From the
McConaughey/Dallas Buyers Club
chapter of my book Starlight Rising:
Acting Up in Movies)

There are so many un-worthies. On the long list would certainly be the awful embalming of Richard Burton as 'Wagner,' Ken Russell's 'Lisztomania' with Roger Daltrey, the slopping of Chopin (Cornel Wilde)in 'A Song to Remember,' the square hipness of 'Paris Blues' with jazzman Paul Newman, and Cary Grant turning Cole Porter into a smiling, then suffering mannequin in 'Night and Day.' As compensation, we hear great music.

David Elliott's book

About Me

David Elliott was film critic of the Chicago Daily News, USA Today, San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN.com, The Reader (San Diego), and covered arts and entertainment for the Chicago Sun-Times. Retired but not hibernating, he lives in green Eugene, Oregon. (Photo by Travis Elliott.)